


A Moment (Blood Magic for Beginners)

by Methoxyethane



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Gen, Humor, Hunter Keith, M/M, Marijuana, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Indulgent, Witch Lance, mostly they get stoned in Lance's apartment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 17:05:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13104654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Methoxyethane/pseuds/Methoxyethane
Summary: Granted Keith only seemed to come over when he NEEDED something from the witch, but he usually hung around to split a beer and watch Star Trek with Lance after anyway.





	A Moment (Blood Magic for Beginners)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TittyAlways](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TittyAlways/gifts).



> Sooooo you'll notice the world building in this one is just... TOP NOTCH. That's because I've been filling out this universe for over fifteen years and know literally the entire planet's historical timeline. It's kind of like MY LIFE's WORK, OR WHATEVER.n You have... absolutely no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes...

After the collapse of the schism, everyone the entire planet over had to replan their entire lives. The humans of course, didn't have to change their lives nearly as drastically as all of the monsters would, having ostensibly lived with them the entire time without knowing it. But over a quarter of the world's population were outed and ruined after the churches fell, and when that many people undergo such drastic changes it's bound to affect everyone else, as well.

For Lance's part, he was one of the few people who genuinely believed they were better off. Okay yeah the terrorist attack and subsequent airbourne-drug-induced riots were probably the worst way to go about exposing the rift in society, since you know, all those people died and now there were a ton of humans who didn't trust that their monster neighbors wouldn't suddenly go on a lunar rampage and therefore there was a fair amount of dual-sided discrimination and judgement, but hey, he wasn't the one who got to decide how the world went. Ultimately though, the secrecy was worse for everyone, and in time things would level out and people would like. Learn to live with each other and not be such bitches.

Lance was also of course, one of the few people who'd ended up with a BETTER job than he'd had before. Not a steadier or more reliable one, because casting glamours on Luminarian church patrons had been what witches like him had been making bank on for literally centuries, but it had also been exhausting and boring and kind of a fate he was trapped into because there weren't enough people in Exile City who could do blood magic and if he HADN'T helped with fixing up Luminarians to blend in with humans the few witches who were in town would have been worked half to death from anemia. 

Now though, people could choose whether or not they wanted to pretend they were human. This both saved a lot of energy just on glamouring their own green skin into human hues - which carried the unfortunate side effect of needing to then pick a race and stick with it even if you got one your neighbors all hate - but moreover, since now witches were allowed to charge decent money for that because it wasn't a necessity they could also afford to expend their time and energy on OTHER things. 

As a result, medicinal blood magic had pretty much skyrocketed in advancements. They had spells for damn near EVERYTHING now.

Spells for hair regrowth, spells to clear up crabs, spells to GIVE crabs to someone, spells to boost your energy when you haven’t gotten enough sleep. Granted they hadn’t yet had time to work out actually  _ useful  _ blood magic like curing cancer or regrowing a lost organ, but that was what Lance was in med school for. Someone had to figure this shit out, and he was willing to take on the burden of world fame and nobel peace prizes that would inevitably flood in once he figured out a spell to cure AIDS and saved the world.

For now however, he was living in a shitty one-bedroom apartment and selling cheap glamours and quick-fix cures for acne and eczema. Hey, a guy still had to PAY for six plus years of college, and it was better than working at K-Mart. For one thing, a retail job wouldn’t involve so many hours of his face in anatomy textbooks trying to figure out what ligaments exactly would need to be enchanted into a carpal tunel relief spell and therefore what corresponding plant would need to go into the blood sacrifice because magic was stupid and you needed to know its stupid nonsense rules to make it WORK.

It was also totally frying his brain with all this THINKING, though. Which was his explanation for for all the marijuana plants mixed in with the variety of herbs he had growing in his… entire east end of the apartment. A guy needed a break to check out of reality every now and then okay? And to be honest, the powerful smell of the ripe plants helped to cover up the leftover stench of blood smoke that couldn’t be eradicated. Lance himself didn’t smell it anymore, so immune to it from exposure he was, but he served all of his customers straight out of his kitchen and weed was a friendler smell than leftover magic was.

So when Keith broke into his apartment from the third story window instead of front door (which you could get literally anyone leaving the building to hold open for you) and the first thing he said was, “Jesus, it smells like Woodstock in here,” Lance knew how to respond.

“Well I had to pick from slaughterhouse, emergency room, or music festival and that seemed like the least offensive theme.” Lance returned, snuffing out his bowl. Keith was a better excuse not to study than getting stoned was anyway.

Keith’s shrug said “Fair enough,” even when his words didn’t, closing the sliding glass balcony door behind him as he wandered into Lance’s home unannounced like an entitled cat. “You don’t have class today?”

“Were you planning on waiting around my living room for me if I wasn’t?” Lance laughed back, sliding around the bar separating his kitchen space from living area to join Keith on the couch. 

“I know your wi-fi password,” Keith said back leisurely, wearing a whatchagonnadoboutit smirk. 

Lance believed that. No because Keith was that comfortable in Lance’s home - which he was, obviously, but because any time Keith broke in with no warning instead of just like, using the fucking phone that meant he was there because he needed something. Six times out of ten what he needed was for Lance to fix up another injury he’d gotten in the field, Blackholt’s own doctors now ill-equipped to deal with the amount of Luminarian-inflicted wounds their officers were getting in a new world where they were less organized and had less manpower than ever at the same time monsters had stopped needing to hide the use of their… natural physical and magical abilities. The results were obvious strain. Blackholt was doing their collective best to competently control crime the human police didn’t know how to handle, but until they recruited more agents Exile City was in a state not far off from chaos.

Keith of course, was thriving beautifully. The deep grey of his uniform jacket (the only part of the uniform anyone bothered to identify themselves with) suited him in more ways than one, and Lance was proud of how smoothly his transition from being a petty criminal to arresting petty criminals was turning out. He’d been kind of a mess when they’d met.

And the other four times out of ten? “What’d you do to yourself this time, anyway?” Lance asked, sniffing at the air. He didn’t have a werewolf’s sense of smell or anything but he could still tell something was odd enough to comment, “You sure don’t  _ smell  _ like you’ve been keeping yourself out of trouble.”

Keith’s face twisted in obvious annoyance. “My job is literally to run around LOOKING for trouble Lance, inevitably some things aren’t gonna end up going smoothly.” He made no move to lift himself off the couch.

Lance grinned. “Hey, there are plenty of cops out there who DON’T end up constantly covered in the blood of their enemies, you could be like any of them and then I wouldn’t run out of my fridge stock so fast.”

Keith’s dismissive eyeroll told everything he needed it to. “You wanna tell me how to do my job you’d better join Blackholt and then outrank me, bud. Now are you gonna help me, or am I gonna be stuck like this until the next,” he paused, searching for the proper word. “ _ Infection _ ?”

He scooted closer to where Keith sat on the couch, their bodies all but pressed together in an effort to annoy the other man. “Hey hey, you gotta pay the piper if you want to hear his fiddle.”

“Everything about that was wrong.”

Lance ignored him. “- And I think if you’re gonna keep blowing through my super-rare Ifrit blood reserves I DEFINITELY deserve an explanation on why you keep needed it. And does this answer involve massive amounts of unprotected sex because that's the only logical reason for this to keep happening at this rate, bro.”

Keith scowled, flipping him an unapologetic bird. “No, jackass, just the same thing that always happens. I was bleeding, she was bleeding, I think at one point I punched her and cut my fingers on her teeth; like eight different ways she may have gotten in me.” 

“Ooooookaaayyyy,” Lance agreed lightly. “So how did this whoever get that close to you when your skin is supposed to start on fire? Didn't the purpose of always wearing ifrit blood involve criminals NOT being able to touch you?”

An indignant huff, before Keith peeled himself off the couch for Lance to fall into the space he’d been sitting when he had no one to lean against any more. Lance didn’t need to sit up in time to see Keith slide into the kitchen to hear him crack open a beer from Lance’s fridge, and then the jerk leaned against the counter and forced Lance to stand up and follow if he wanted to keep physically annoying him. Which he did, and would.

“Because I wasn’t an ifrit at the time.” A pause, where Keith shifted his eyes away from Lance and stalled with a sip of beer, which Lance already knew to be a brand he didn’t even like. Stared absently towards the leftover plate of pidgeon intestines from Lance’s lunch, which he would have cleaned up if he’d known he was having  _ company _ . “I was a frankenstein.”

A beat of silence. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOURSELF?” Lance practically howled. “Why would you need to USE that shit, did you let yourself get cut in  _ HALF  _ or something?!”

“Don’t be such a drama queen,” Keith drawled airily. “...I just got my hand cut off a little by one of Haggar’s cronies and needed to fix it after,” he said in a too-fast-to-be-casual voice.

_ “DO YOU EVEN HEAR YOURSELF SPEAK?! _ ‘Cut off a  **_LITTLE?_ ** !’”

His companion’s righteous indignation manifested itself in a scoff and hand on his hip, biting out a serious, “Well it was my arm or Shiro’s EVERYTHING, I wasn’t about to let him get cut in half! I have options, but he’s already got one fake arm as it is and can’t really afford to lose much more…” his nose scrunched, the next word rank with disgust. “ _ Flesh _ .”

Lance supposed that was fair enough. Shiro was one of the only humans they knew after all, and Keith’s accelerated healing was a good enough excuse to use himself as a human shield. (Er - mirror shield? That sounded like an item in Zelda, but it was technically the more accurate description.) Not that Shiro or Lance or like, anyone besides Keith APPROVED of this recklessness, but they could hardly stop him either. 

He stole the can out of Keith’s hands and took a drink.

“So, after the fight I used the emergency frankenstein blood you gave me and sewed the hand back on, good as new,” Keith defended with absolute confidence, pulling his jacket sleeve out of the way to show the line white of scar tissue running around from the thumb to halfway up his forearm. “My own original and everything, not a big deal.”

Yes, because not having to steal a limb off of a dead body made the need to sew one’s own hand back on perfectly natural. “So since I didn’t have the nerves to feel if yesterday’s shitty con artist getting the knife on me or whatever, I didn’t know I was bleeding and didn’t realize I was close enough to get HER blood up on me and end up… where I did.”

Well that, Lance decided, was interesting. Not the dumbass part about Keith’s near-miraculous ability to get himself injured, but rather instead the part where he hadn’t yet once actually mentioned what species this mysterious crook was, and therefore what species he was now reflecting. Which meant it had to be something Lance would take great joy in.

He grinned, slinking closer to Keith, looming close enough to the other man to press his full body weight against him. His height advantage was enough for Lance to see the white roots of Keith’s hair crowning the mostly black top of his head, and Lance absently wondered why he’d decided to start dying it again. “You know you’re not gonna get away with not saying where it you ended up, right? Come on dude I’m dying here, I  _ gots  _ to know what species you are now, you just look like a human from here.”

Keith tried to roll his eyes but Lance knew he was more amused with Lance than he was annoyed, especially when instead leaving Lance to topple over again he stood on his toes to press up back against Lance, hard enough that the witch had to struggle against him not to be shoved off his own feet. “You’re gonna laugh, and when you do I’m gonna jam my elbow into your spleen,” he warned with a mix of slight reluctance but also audible humor. 

“That’s fair,” Lance agreed instantly.

“Yeah,” Keith said with the casualness of a bandain being ripped off. “She was a cupid.”

A pause.

As predicted, Lance burst out laughing and Keith elbowed him in the ribs. Not that he was actually angry, Lance could see him smiling with joined humor as he defended, “Hey man, the Eros are scarier than any goddamned succubus. Pheromones that affect the sex drive are one thing but cupids can trick your brain into thinking you’re in genuine soul-to-soul  _ love _ . This bitch from yesterday was destroying people’s entire LIVES.”

“Oh shit,” Lance agreed, the giggles still slowly draining out of his system. “Yeah that’s pretty scary, you got me there.” Another beat. “Did she like…  _ get  _ you?”

“I’m gay and Shiro’s married, it was pretty easy to cut through the bullshit.” He finally stole the beer back, and Lance wondered as he watched him take a sip why they seemed to always wind up sharing whatever they were drinking or smoking. “Make fun all you want, but it’s been a pain in my ass for two days straight. I don’t know how to control these weird chemicals, practically everyone I talk to keeps falling in love with me! Strangers I pass on the street try to get me to MARRY them!”

Lance couldn’t have held back the laughter if he’d tried, which, quite generally he wasn’t anyway. Keith wasn’t even angry at him, obviously agreeing that he was the last person in the world suited to being a love-magnet and therefore understanding why this was  _ so fucking hilarious _ . 

“If you’re done, can I just about get something to replace it? I’d take warg-rat at this point, man, just. Get them to leave me alone again, I can’t take this.”

Lance ruffled his hair with a final snort of laughter, kicking open the fridge. “I knew it, you don’t love me for me, you’re only here for the hook-ups. I’m so heartbroken!” Honestly Keith could have easily found the ifrit blood he wanted when he’d stolen one of Lance’s cheap beers. Lance had all of his samples in small vials and clearly labeled, and since his diet consisted mainly of bones he could pretty much dedicate his entire refrigerator to spell ingredients. A whole rack of blood right on the door where the condiments would go, except he only owned a bottle of hot sauce so it was on the very top shelf with all of the other things one might loosely classify as ‘edible.’ 

But Keith understood that Luminatrian blood samples were not only a vital ingredient in Lance’s spellcasting when he was trying to custom-cure his clients, but also incredibly valuable as a commodity as-is. His species may be the only ones CALLED blood witches, but he was far from the only one who knew what the wrong blood sample could do in the wrong hands. The ‘Chasing Alice’ drug riots were proof alone of that.

Speaking of mirror blood - or at least hallucinogens made out of thereof - there was the dilemma of  _ Keith’s  _ payment. “Hmmm,” Lance hummed with theatric thoughtfulness, jutting out his hip and tapping the vial he’d retrieved against his chin. “I dunno, I only have the one ifrit client, Keith. My last sample might be too valuable to just give to you like this, you know?”

Just because they were friends didn’t mean he could afford to keep hooking Keith up with free DNA samples all the time, and Lance usually just accepted a trade-off of a sample of Keith’s even-MORE-valuable blood. But Keith was getting injured or changing species so often Lance had more blood samples from him than he was even using in his research, and taking even more blood from someone who’d just gotten a limb detached seemed like poor judgement.

Keith frowned petulantly, which came out in an adorable pout. His voice was still light and playful when he rejoined,“You know I’m kind of a cop, right? I feel like my not reporting the pot plant and selling spells without a license should deserved a pretty good payoff, personally.”

“Shouldn’t I just report you back for extortion? A little blood today might be ‘protection money’ tomorrow, with a crooked cop like you.”

All remaining annoyance was gone, a smirk stealing it’s way across Keith’s face whether he liked it or not. “I can’t afford to lose my job, kind sir!” He batted his eyelashes, which almost managed to be charming just from the length of his eyelashes alone but the rest of his sarcastic and unfeminine face made the gesture look as comical as… well, as it was intended to be. “Surely there must be something we can work out?”

“Surely mister police officer can think of the appropriate payment.”

“That depends,” Keith’s voice dropped it’s flirtiness like a sandbag out of a hot air balloon, and ended up dead in the middle of confused. “Are you paying for my blackmail with blood, or am I paying your blackmail with my body because I don’t think we can both extort each other.”

Lance doubled over in immediate laughter, which he was glad to hear Keith join in on. He finally tossed the small glass container of blood at Keith, who had to stop laughing himself before he could go through with his ritual of seeking out the freshest scab or open wound on himself to pour a few drops onto. He didn’t do that yet right away either, snatching the half-can of beer up from the counter first to head back the couch before bothering with his blood, kicking the remote to Lance’s shitty 32” hand me-down over to himself and instantly finding the Star Trek rerun Lance had paused on his X-Box. 

Something about how comfortable Keith was making himself in Lance’s home brought stupid kind of glow to his insides, and the only explanation Lance could manage to fig up for the dopey feeling was how cool it was for him to be one of the like, two people in the entire universe Keith would relax like this around. 

He grabbed his pipe up off the counter on his way to join him, perfectly satisfied to follow Keith around his own flat like a puppy. “How long will it take?” Lance asked, accepting the can back from Keith with the thought that one of them ought to have thought to pull a second one out while they were still in the kitchen. 

Keith’s skin looked like it was already flushing redder with warmth, a fever-like sweat breaking out as his body temperature rose. “I didn’t notice the change this last time so I’m not sure. Half hour to an hour, I think?”

Lance’s eyebrows shot up. “It used to take two full weeks!”

Keith just shrugged, using the end of the gesture to finally slip off his coat and toss it onto the space beside him on the L-shaped loveseat. Lately Keith preferred to stay inside for shortening duration of his transformations, staying over at Lance’s place overnight more than once to crash on this very couch. If the time was that short now, there was no reason to even bother stepping outside in this vulnerable state. Sometimes going out at the times when you were most likely to die was unavoidable, but when it wasn’t there was no point in pointless risk taking. Especially wise considering Keith was so prone to getting his damned race accidentally changed on a dime, lord knows only he could have it happen in a window that short.

“It used to take a full month when I was younger. Pidge said the body just adapts and gets used to changing so often, so it takes less and less time every run now.”

That sounded both awesome AND terrifying. “You could like, carry a whole sample set with you and change like a video character switching classes. Like, you’re fighting a harpy who hijacked a plane so BAM! You just friggin transform into a fuckin’... I don’t know, asparas, or one of those other flying things and meet ‘em in the sky for battle like a SUPERHERO.”

Keith’s face scrunched up again, he asked Lance with an incredulous eyebrow, “You want me to carry around like… a petri slideshow full of blood samples and pull them out like in battle like Yugi-Oh cards? That seems kind of fucked up, Lance.”

He kicked at Keith’s leg. “You’re the one who just POURED blood over your scabbed knuckles like some kind of fucked up vampire prize fighter, dude!”

Keith kicked back. “That’s better than being a vampire Sailor Moon like you’re suggesting!”

They spent a few moments generally trying to shove their feet into each other personal space like children, kicking at each other’s shins until they couldn’t hold the laughter back enough to to anything but wheeze from it.

“You gotta be back at work?” Lance finally asked after a good twenty minutes of listening to Next Gen while he watched Keith’s skin start to slowly steam out of the corner of his eye. It was only about five or six, and he knew Blackholt was still used to operating out of the dead of night from habits of chasing the full moon. 

“I’ve got to go in later for a couple hours of paperwork, but you know I wouldn’t have opened a beer if I was going out into the field tonight.” Keith finished the beer, crushing the can in one hand.

Lance grinned. “Then you have no reason to resist~” He sang cheerfully, offering the freshly packed of his favorite (adorably squid-shaped) glass pipe.

Keith first looked at him incredulously, then thoughtfully. “I don’t think it’ll help me do it faster, but I know I don’t WANT to do paperwork sober.” He accepted the pipe, shooting Lance a sharp glare as he brought it and the lighter to his face. “Don’t tell Shiro about this.”

Lance laughed. 

They spent the next hour filling the room with warm-scented smoke as Keith slowly turned into fire. 

  
  
  
  
\--  
  


Feel free to bother me at my writing and art blog [thesmutwitch ](http://thesmutwitch.tumblr.com/)and my fandom garbage blog [yoyo-dodo](http://yoyo-dodo.tumblr.com/)


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